Norman Hartnell: master of the royal wardrobe

BY Linda Grant |
30 September 2007

Norman Hartnell dressed the Queen for the two most important occasions of her life - her wedding and her coronation - yet has long been dismissed as a fashion irrelevance. As a new book sets out to rehabilitate the couturier's reputation, Linda Grant celebrates his life and work

Walking along Bruton Street in Mayfair a few months ago I glanced up and saw a blue plaque commemorating the spot where Norman Hartnell's couture house once stood. Hartnell is chiefly remembered today as the royal dressmaker, which is not, as they say, a particularly fashion-forward field. Someone has to dress the royals as they go on their walkabouts, but it chiefly involves the obeying of unalterable rules - that the Queen must stand out in any crowd, that she can't have her skirt hoiked up when she steps out of a limousine and that her hat mustn't blow off in high wind.

Only a few years after Hartnell's death in 1979 Bruce Oldfield was designing for Diana, Princess of Wales, and what anyone else in the Royal Family wore was only interesting in the sense that it was so dowdy by contrast. But, as Michael Pick reveals in his new book, Be Dazzled! Norman Hartnell: Sixty Years of Glamour and Fashion, Hartnell not only designed one of the most important dresses of the 20th century, the Queen's coronation outfit, but was single-handedly responsible for turning London into a design centre, if not to rival Paris, at least to challenge its sole, overwhelming supremacy.

For until Hartnell, British designers such as Charles Worth and Edward Molyneux either moved their operations to Paris, or stayed at home and focused on what even the French grudgingly acknowledged the English were renowned for: tailoring, particularly the tweed day suit so essential in draughty, damp English country houses. There was no British couture and, if you wanted to dress well, you had to cross the Channel. Paris was fashion, supported by a vast sub-industry of ateliers that sewed on the beading and feathers.

During his long life Hartnell fell into and out of fashion. Born in 1901, he was the son of a publican who reinvented himself as a more genteel trader in wholesale wines and spirits. Hartnell uneasily acknowledged his humble origins, but made it to Cambridge where he mixed with a fast set. In 1922 he designed costumes for a fashionable revival of The Beggar's Opera, attracting the attention of the Evening Standard, which dubbed him 'the British dress genius of the future'. He tried, without success, to get a job in fashion, and, with family money to back him, set up a business on Bruton Street in 1923.

From the start he was a society dressmaker - his clients were the mothers and sisters of his Cambridge friends. But Paris was the centre of the fashion universe, and upper-class women no more wanted to buy English couture than they did English wine or English perfume. Hartnell's fitter, Germaine Davide, had to explain to him: 'Every English lady wishes for something that is French. If it were not for the pure beauty of your dresses, you would not sell a single one.' Three years after his first collection he showed in Paris. It was a disaster; the future American designer Mainbocher told him, 'I have never seen so many incredibly beautiful dresses so incredibly badly made.'

Hartnell had to go back to London to learn how to make clothes. When he returned to Paris in 1929 it was with his own new look - he is credited with introducing the longer-length skirts that would mark the end of the flapper era. Instead of staying there, he set himself up in London as a couturier, moving into larger premises at 26 Bruton Street, where he received a visit from Lady Alice Montagu-Douglas-Scott, who was about to marry the King's youngest son, the Duke of Gloucester. Hartnell knew that if he got the commission, he would be dressing not just the bride herself but the young bridesmaids, who included the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret. He would go on dressing the future Queen and her mother for most of his career.

It is the misfortune of Hartnell's reputation that his royal clients are not famous for their sense of style. They didn't attend fashionable cocktail parties, and they were constrained by the severe limitations of their office. The Queen Mother loved clothes, and in her early years was dressed by Lanvin. In Hartnell's hands she always wore the pastels she felt suited her, resembling a bunch of sweet peas, he said, but her wardrobe lacked the formal elegance of the black cocktail dress. Indeed, her husband, George VI, wanted his wife to be a counterpoint to the brittle, over-dieted fashion plate Wallis Simpson. The King took Hartnell on a tour of the Royal Collection, showing him paintings of earlier queens to inspire him. The look was to be regal, timeless. Tradition!

Hartnell designed the Queen Mother's entire wardrobe for her 1938 royal tour, a commission of 30 dresses that were to inspire the future couturier, Christian Dior, when he put together the New Look nine years later. To both men the silhouette invented by Chanel - clothes for modern, working women, styles so revolutionary they are wearable today - were hateful. In an interview in 1968 he said, 'I'm sick to death of the saying, "Elegance is utter simplicity." I think it's a hoodwink. Some designers just lack the inventiveness to make it non-simple.'

Couture seldom sets trends, because its point is the fineness of its workmanship. What makes you gasp about Hartnell's clothes, like Dior's, is their dreamy romanticism and their lavish beading. This is what couture really is: the hand-made garment in which every stitch is sewn with the finest thread money can buy. He got his opportunity when he was commissioned to design first Princess Elizabeth's wedding dress, then her coronation outfit. The wedding dress and its train were embroidered with thousands of seed pearls and crystal beads in garlands of lilies and white York roses, but its successor, the coronation dress, is considered to be one of the most lavishly decorated of the 20th century.

'I thought of lilies, roses, marguerites and golden corn,' Hartnell wrote in his autobiography. 'I thought of altar clothes and sacred vestments; I thought of the sky, the earth, the sun, the moon, the stars and everything heavenly that might be embroidered on a dress destined to be historic.' The Queen had requested that it be modelled in its silhouette on her wedding gown, but also wanted the emblems of the United Kingdom - shamrocks and thistles - and all her dominions somehow to be included. It was Hartnell's high watermark. He was not really a designer for the masses, though during the war the clothing firm Berketex had asked him to create a collection of Utility day dresses, as if John Galliano should descend from Paris and make a range for Marks & Spencer Per Una. Throughout the 1950s he continued to design for royal tours. His clothes represented Britain, as the young queen and her retinue travelled the world, but he knew that his brief was not to set fashion. It was all rules, rules, rules, determined by the minutiae of royal duties. He tried to crack the American market, but he was competing with French couture for the same small pool of exceptionally rich women who wanted society evening clothes.

Hartnell went on designing throughout the 1960s. The startling pictures of the Queen and her mother in modest mini-skirts are legacies of his gentle attempts to bring them up to date, but the decade of Mary Quant and Biba was a revolt against everything Hartnell and the British couture designers represented. By 1968 his staff, whose most junior member had been there for 20 years, was reduced by almost half. 'There just aren't the rich people these days,' he said. And even if there were, he could not find workers who were prepared to half-blind themselves sewing on sequins. The customers were loyal - too loyal. One woman brought in for repairs a dress she had bought in the 1930s.

He knew his designs were what he called 'square', but he could not afford to be innovative, taking on talented, radical young students as Dior had with done Yves Saint Laurent, for fear of alienating the Royal Family. In the 1970s he lost his beloved country house to the bank as the business contracted, and when he died in 1979 it was in modest circumstances.

He was gossipy and amusing and held his own in high society. But sometimes you feel that he longed to be let out of the straitjacket his aristocratic clients imposed on him. He had liberated two generations of upper-class woman from days spent encased in damp tweeds. He wanted them to be more romantic than perhaps they really were. But he was under no illusions about his own provenance. 'It's Regency by Peter Jones,' he said of his country house.